Sarkar, chief minister of Tripura since 1998, has been a guiding force in the fencing of over four-fifths of the 856-km border his state shares with Bangladesh. At the same time he has also been pushing for better road and rail logistics to facilitate trade and commerce with Bangladesh and the rest of India. Tripura does not have a broad-gauge rail network and the only road from Assam is too narrow to cope with large-scale movement of heavy cargo.
India is now building a broad-gauge rail network that will not only connect Agartala but extend to Sabroom on Tripura’s southern border with Bangladesh. This will create logistics options for a possible railroad link to Bangladesh’s Chittagong seaport, further south of Sabroom. That’s not all. In February, the two countries signed an agreement to build a broad-gauge rail link between Agartala and Dhaka, to be funded by India.
Since Dhaka has already resumed train services with Kolkata (2008), the proposed rail link (Agartala-Dhaka), may, in the long run, connect Agartala and the rest of North-East India with Kolkata, through Dhaka. That would be a much shorter route than the current one, which goes around Bangladesh.